While Canada’s finance minister was doling out more borrowed money on Tuesday, one of his colleagues on the Liberals’ front benches was desperately in search of some peace to keep.

Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan needs a battle zone. Preferably not one in which combatants are actively engaged in shooting at one another. The ideal situation would be a region where tensions are high, but the killing has temporarily abated.

Sajjan is eager to deploy some peacekeepers, and he needs to do it quickly. There’s a big United Nations conference coming up for countries with active peacekeeping forces in November, and Canada is hosting it. Unfortunately, through some unexplained oversight, our peacekeeping forces have fallen to record low levels. Lower than they were under Stephen Harper, who the Liberals regularly accused of besmirching Canada’s good name at the UN. Lower than they were under Jean Chrétien, who oversaw one of the saddest eras of decline in Canadian forces history. Lower than they’ve been at any point in almost 30 years, which is pretty sad, considering there’s been no shortage of countries that could badly use some peace.

Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan needs a battle zone

This is an embarrassment. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government loudly and repeatedly pledged to make Canada great again in the peacekeeping world. Seldom did the Liberal leader’s rhetoric soar to greater heights then when he was extolling the glorious record of Canada’s past as a peacekeeping supremo. Images of Canadian blue helmets were evoked at every opportunity. The great peacekeeper himself, Lester B. Pearson, winner of the Nobel Prize, was raised to icon status. One would have thought Liberals had invented and single-handedly implemented the very notion of international peacekeeping, the way they went on about it. And, if elected, there would be more, much more, Trudeau promised.

“As the number of violent conflicts in the world escalates, demand for international peace operations has never been greater,” the Liberal platform declared (right after claiming Harper had “dramatically scaled back” Canada’s efforts).

“We will recommit to supporting international peace operations with the United Nations, and will make our specialized capabilities … available on a case-by-case basis.

“We will provide well-trained personnel that can be quickly deployed, including mission commanders, staff officers, and headquarters units.

Somewhere along the line, the lofty pledges got misplaced

“We will lead an international effort to improve and expand the training of military and civilian personnel deployed on peace operations, and will insist that any peacekeepers involved in misconduct be held accountable by their own country and the United Nations.”

Well, um … yes. Except it appears that, somewhere along the line, the lofty pledges got misplaced — perhaps in a closet with other abandoned promises for electoral reform and limited deficits — and the new government discovered it couldn’t find anyplace quite suitable to offer Canada’s “specialized capabilities.”

As of Tuesday, according to the UN, Canada had just 68 active peacekeepers out there, stabilizing the world. The number was down from 112 in August 2016, partly due to the UN reducing its mission in Haiti. Of those 68, 40 are police, which leaves just 28 actual troops or military experts. Given the enjoyment the prime minister gets from giving speeches at the UN, offering ringing declarations of Canada’s intention to do universal good, it’s a bit disconcerting to discover that his government hasn’t managed, in two years of trying, to find anywhere all that goodness could be put to practical use.

Now the pressure is on

Now the pressure is on. The conference in Vancouver is intended specifically for countries that have delivered concrete contributions to peacekeeping. More than 500 delegates from some 70 countries and international organizations are expected to be on hand. The minister is going to look pretty bad if he’s asked to deliver a welcoming address and there are more people in the front row than in Canada’s worldwide peacekeeping contingent.

It could be especially awkward given that a major theme of the get-together will be the “integration of gender perspectives” in peacekeeping. Gender perspectives is what J. Trudeau is all about. If the prime minister prides himself on anything, it’s his unrelenting focus on ensuring everyone in Canada knows he thinks constantly about gender fairness, every moment he isn’t thinking of other fairness issues. But how much room can there be for an extensive examination of gender perspectives when your world-wide peacekeeping contingent consists of 68 people?

According to UN figures from August, Canada’s contribution to UN forces puts us well behind such comparative giants as Cameroon, Burundi, Burkina Faso, Indonesia and India. When Bob Rae, Trudeau’s new special envoy to Myanmar, arrives on the scene, he will discover that neighbouring Bangladesh — one of the world’s poorest countries — has more than 100 times the number of active peacekeepers as Canada. Ireland, which has roughly one-eighth Canada’s population, has contributed almost 30 times the number of troops. Austria, Benin, Denmark … they all leave us in their dust, though we are marginally ahead of Bolivia.

It is not as if bodies are lacking

It’s not as if the bodies are lacking. Sajjan has promised up to 750 troops and police for UN duty. Ottawa has just been unable to decide on precisely the right place to send them to save the peace. Mali? Congo? Liberia? Syria? The UN has 15 missions currently underway, involving 94,154 personnel. Surely there must be a gap in there somewhere, in which a few hundred brave Canadian men and women could contribute the specialized capabilities of which the prime minister likes to brag.

On Tuesday, Trudeau issued a statement marking UN Day, harking back to Canada’s “storied past” within the world body, where we “lay the foundation for peacekeeping missions.”

Maybe it’s time to quit boasting about the past and start concentrating on the present.

When my assistant said there was a call from the White House, I picked up, said 'Hello' and started to ask if this was a prank

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